I am posting with my real name unlike other persons. I had NOTHING to do with the "Committee for Responsible Museum Management" at Western Railway Museum. The person who posts here as "Dr. Zarkoff" did.

The Bay Area Electric Railway Association (BAERA) began as a railfan group. It is one of the very few railfan organizations in this country that later built a viable railway museum. Many cities had two separate organizations: one for railfans and the other to build a museum. Of course many people belonged to both organizations.

BAERA in 1960 opened "The California Railway Museum" at Rio Vista Junction. It was primarily a streetcar and interurban museum for the cars which had been acquired to prevent them from being scrapped. They had been stored all over the local area. But as various railroad roundhouses and shop buildings began to be torn down, a location was needed to store equipment. Some of the heavyweight passenger cars were owned personally by one of the BAERA members. He later donated them to the museum.

After the state of California opened a railroad museum in Sacramento about 50 miles away many people were confused by two very similar names. So BAERA changed the name of its museum to "Western Railway Museum" (WRM) to reduce confusion. Although it began primarily with electric railroad equipment, WRM began adding steam and diesel equipment.

In my opinion the California State Railroad Museum does one of the best jobs of interpreting railroad history to the public of any museum anywhere in the world. With a mountain of money behind the state museum, there was no way WRM could compete in quality.

Robert Dollar #3 sat in the shop building at WRM for over ten years. When the person in charge of this project could not come up with a budget or timetable for completing restoration of #3 and getting it out of the shop, the BAERA Board decided to end the steam program. In compliance with Association of Railroad Museum standards, BAERA traded the disassembled locomotive to Pacific Locomotive Association which completed restoration. It now operates on the Niles Canyon Railway. (I rode behind it yesterday).